Fleeing the shelling, civilians left the southern Ukrainian city on Saturday that they had celebrated the recapture of just weeks earlier.
The Kherson exodus comes as Ukraine solemnly remembers a Stalin-era famine and tries to ensure that Russia’s war in Ukraine does not deprive others around the world of its vital food exports.
A line of trucks, vans and cars, some hauling trailers or transporting pets and other belongings, stretched a kilometer or more outside Kherson.
Days of heavy shelling by Russian forces led to a bittersweet exodus: many civilians were glad their city had been retaken, but regretted they could not stay.
Cars are seen leaving Kherson on Saturday. (Bernat Armangue/The Associated Press)
“It’s sad that we’re leaving our home,” said Yevhen Yankov, in a van he was slowly driving.
“Now we are free, but we have to leave because there are bombings, and there are deaths among the population.”
“Everything was on fire”
Svitlana Romanivna poked her head out from behind and added: “We went through a real hell. Our neighborhood was burning, it was a nightmare. Everything was on fire.”
Emilie Fourrey, emergency project coordinator for the aid group Doctors Without Borders in Ukraine, said the evacuation of 400 patients from the Kherson psychiatric hospital, which is located near a power plant and the first line, had started on Thursday and had to be continued. in the next few days.
A damaged house in Dnipro, Ukraine, is pictured Saturday after a Russian missile attack. (Mykola Synelnykov/Reuters)
In recent days, Ukraine has faced an onslaught of Russian artillery fire and drone strikes, with the shelling of Kherson particularly intense. Bombing has often been primarily aimed at infrastructure, although civilian casualties have been reported. Repair crews across the country were scrambling to restore failing heat, power and water services.
Russia has stepped up its attacks on critical infrastructure after suffering setbacks on the battlefield. A prominent Russian nationalist said on Saturday that the Russian military does not have enough doctors, in a rare public admission of problems within the military.
Meanwhile, in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy oversaw a busy day of diplomacy, welcomed several European Union leaders for meetings and hosted an “International Summit on Food Security” to discuss the country’s food security and agricultural exports.
The Prime Ministers of Belgium, Poland and Lithuania attended, as well as the President of Hungary, and many others participated by video.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine, despite its own financial difficulties, has allocated 900 million hryvna (US$24 million) to buy corn for Yemen, Sudan, Kenya and Nigeria.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine was working to get its grain to ships and countries that need it.
“Our goal is ambitious and specific: to save at least five million people from hunger,” he said.
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The reminder about the food supply was timely: Ukrainians were commemorating the 90th anniversary of the start of the “Holodomor,” or Great Famine, which killed more than three million people in two years when the Soviet government under dictator Josef Stalin confiscated food and grain supplies. and deported many Ukrainians.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz marked the commemoration by drawing parallels with the impact of the war in Ukraine on global markets. Ukraine’s exports have resumed under a United Nations deal, but are still well below pre-war levels, pushing up world prices.
“We cannot tolerate what we are witnessing”
“Today, we stand united to affirm that hunger must never again be used as a weapon,” Scholz said in a video message.
“That is why we cannot tolerate what we are witnessing: the worst global food crisis in years with sickening consequences for millions of people, from Afghanistan to Madagascar, from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa.”
He said that Germany, together with the UN World Food Program, will provide an additional 15 million euros for new grain shipments from Ukraine.
Scholz spoke as a cross-party group of lawmakers in Germany is trying to pass a parliamentary resolution next week recognizing the 1930s famine as “genocide”.
Last year, Ukraine and Russia provided about 30 percent of the world’s exported wheat and barley, 20 percent of its corn and more than 50 percent of its sunflower oil, he said. ‘UN.
Kyiv water service restored
In a post on the Telegram social network on Saturday, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said more than 3,000 specialists from a local company continued to work “around the clock” and had managed to restore heat to more than 90 percent of residential buildings.
Although about a quarter of Kyiv residents remained without power, he said water service had been restored to everyone in the city.
People use their mobile phones as lights to look at merchandise inside a sporting goods store during a power outage in Kyiv on Saturday. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
The struggle to restore power came as Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo met Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Saturday.
“This may be a difficult winter,” he said, referring to Belgium’s contributions of generators and support to schools and hospitals in Ukraine, as well as military aid such as “fuel, machine guns, self-propelled artillery, etc. “.
“And by being here, we hope to provide you with hope and resilience to fight through this difficult time.”